Tuesday, October 12, 2010

On the Harmony of Creation and the Brotherhood of Mankind

In the beginning God created man, thus dividing himself against himself. As soon as God made man in his own image, and gave man his own breath for life, unity disappeared from the world, never to return. Since he did not wish to destroy his creation, God was forced to create woman, in order to give man someone else to hate. But instead of distracting themselves with squabbles, the man and the woman joined forces and gained the knowledge of good and evil, thereby making themselves morally superior to God, who is Who he is and cannot be improved. The man and the woman tried to disguise the change in themselves by wearing clothes, but God saw through the trick and expelled them from Eden, whereupon for punishment they were compelled to breed. On the principle of divide and rule, God showed arbitrary favouritism towards Abel, with the result that Cain killed him and was cursed with a life of wandering. Cain founded the first city, where people could be thrown more closely together than ever before, and where slaves could hate their masters, and farmers could hate bureaucrats, and civilians could hate soldiers, and God saw that it was good. When men, lonely for God, tried to reach him again with a great tower, God confused their speech and set them even more firmly against one another. After drowning a good many as a hint of his disapproval, God reverted once again to the stratagem he had used against Cain and Abel: he arbitrarily favoured a single family, which grew into a clan of Egyptian immigrants. Hated by the natives because they did work that could have been done by Egyptian slaves, the clan became a band of marauding thugs who invaded the land of Canaan, destroying cities up and down the country and massacring the people, though not to the point of total extermination, since otherwise there would have been nobody left to hate - at least, nobody except the more powerful thugs in Egypt and Assyria and Heaven. But unless the object of one's hatred is weaker than oneself, even hatred can lose some of its charm. Therefore, after the routine execution some time afterward of a minor religious agitator, God afflicted the mind of a professor of hatred on the road to Damascus, proclaiming From this petty creature will I build my church; and at that point was born the most extensive and powerful instrument of hatred until the advent of the nation state. And God in his senility saw that it was good and, through a tsunami here and an earthquake there, continued to smile fatuously upon his creation.